§ Statement of Purpose

The View from 1776 presents a framework to understand present-day issues from the viewpoint of the colonists who fought for American independence in 1776 and wrote the Constitution in 1787. Knowing and preserving those understandings, what might be called the unwritten constitution of our nation, is vital to preserving constitutional government. Without them, the bare words of the Constitution are just a Rorschach ink-blot that politicians, educators, and judges can interpret to mean anything they wish.

"We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams, to the Officers of the First Brigade, Third Division, Massachusetts Militia, October 11, 1798.

§ American Traditions

§ People and Ideas

§ Decline of Western Civilization: a Snapshot

§ Books to Read

§ BUY MY BOOK

Junk Science

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

The Information-Closed Universe of Liberal-Progressivism

Worshippers of the secular, materialistic religion of liberal-progressivism, particularly since Darwin’s 1859 Origin of Species, accept as an unquestioned article of faith that there is a one-on-one relationship between edicts of the political state and results of such political action. If liberal-progressives conceive it, it is an accomplished fact.

Liberal-progressives have been energized by their doctrinaire certainty that God, through His externally imposed intelligent design, is no more than ignorant superstition. Their corollary faith is that all of life on earth is the product of random collisions of material force. This leads liberal-progressives to assert that, their superior intelligence having discerned this supposed reality, they are enabled by their superior knowledge to conquer nature and to structure political society in ways that guarantee perfection of humanity.

This faith in secular, materialistic religion, however, blinds them to the fact that matters seldom work as they predict.

We have seen this in spades during the past eight years in the Federal Reserve’s dogged adherence to Keynesian economics, the product of an economic theory that posits the political state as the primary, if not sole, source of the nation’s economic wellbeing. Ditto with regard to the entirety of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society entitlements programs and the president’s ObamaCare.

As countless commentators have noted, liberal-progressivism excludes the possibility that individuals may know, better then the political state, what is best for them. Also banished from public square discussion is the age-old truth that the spiritual realm, most evident in the West’s Judeo-Christian heritage, is ultimately more powerful than the political state’s secular and materialistic religion.

Saturday, February 28, 2015

The Nature Of Evidence

Some leading advocates of man-made global warming and of regulatory actions to terminate use of the world’s cheapest and most efficient sources of energy admit the truth: it’s a secular religion masquerading as science.

We are repeatedly told by President Obama and mainstream media that all the world’s scientists support the global-warming tenet. This is a lie in the nature of, “If you like your health insurance and your present doctor you can keep them.” Increasingly so-called evidence of global warming is steadily being revealed as creation of fraudulent data or mendacious manipulation of data.

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Even Great Britain Admits That “Warmest Year” Is Unconfirmed

The UK has been one of the staunchest advocates of global warming and the need to wreck the economy with energy strangulation, on the assumption that liberal-progressive minds have god-like powers to control the universe. God-created nature, however, has for the last couple of decades failed to bend to liberal-progressive minds.

Climate Reporting’s Hot MessAP takes the cake in the relentless campaign by global-warming journalists to discredit their own profession.

By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.
Jan. 20, 2015 8:07 p.m. ET

News reporting of the latest climate alarm was not uniformly bad. Among hundreds of publications in the Factiva database, exactly one—the Mail on Sunday, one of those derided London tabloids—injected the phrase “statistically significant” into consideration of whether 2014 was in any meaningful sense the “hottest year on record.”

A nonjournalistic source and not exactly an outfit of climate-change deniers, Berkeley Earth, also noted that, when it comes to 2014 and the other “hottest year” candidates, 2005 and 2010, the observed temperature difference was smaller than the margin of error by a factor of five, adding: “Therefore it is impossible to conclude from our analysis which of 2014, 2010, or 2005 was actually the warmest year.”

To its credit, the Washington Post alluded to the possibly more important fact that “rising temperatures have not kept pace with computer simulations that predicted even faster warming.”

The New York Times contributed nothing to reader enlightenment as usual, and the Associated Press committed a howler by claiming that “nine of the 10 hottest years in NOAA global records have occurred since 2000. The odds of this happening at random are about 650 million to 1, according to University of South Carolina statistician John Grego. ”

This might be true if Earth’s climate were dice, where rolling a six has no effect on the odds of the next roll being a six. But climate is a continuous process of incremental change. A unified theory of media idiocy on climate is beyond the scope of this column, but even someone with the apparently parched intellect of an AP editor should be able to look at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration charts and notice that cool years are grouped with cool years, warm years with warm years, and in-between years with in-between years.

Either NOAA’s entire temperature history is a statistical anomaly of incomprehensible, galactic proportions—or AP has peddled itself a faulty assumption. And sure enough, Mr. Grego tells me AP specifically instructed him to assume “all years had the same probability of being ‘selected’ as one of the 10 hottest years on record.” This is akin to assuming that, because you weighed 195 pounds at some point in your life, there should be an equal chance of you weighing 195 pounds at any point in your life, even when you were a baby.

The real mystery, though, would be if the warmest years did not bunch up in the post-1998 period, given the sharp warming observed from the late 1970s to the late 1990s.

When climate reporters robotically insist, as they did again this week, that the 2000s represent the hottest period in the rather skimpy, 134-year historical record, they are merely reiterating that the pre-1998 warming happened. No clear trend up or down has been apparent since then.

The bigger problem, of course, is that evidence of warming is not evidence of what causes warming. One would be astonished if mankind, with its prodigious release of greenhouse gases and other activities, were not having an impact on climate. But how and how much are the crucial questions.

But all this is magisterially beside the point in a sense. If the decades have validated any set of propositions, it’s the following: Mankind is unlikely to do anything meaningful about carbon dioxide as a matter of concerted public policy, and anything it does will be in the service of domestic pork interests, having no impact on climate.

Even if humanity could assert bureaucratic control over climate, the cost-benefit case would remain problematic—the costs being huge and the benefits necessarily being as uncertain as man’s role in causing climate change.

A carbon tax as part of pro-growth tax reform is one measure that might pass a cost-benefit test, thanks mainly to the nonclimate benefits of tax reform. Alas, no sign exists that a quorum of countries is ready to march together down this road. President Obama this week decided to use the tax-reform opportunity to pursue partisan class-warfare themes rather than advance a carbon tax proposal in exchange for lower rates.

So the climate problem, if there’s a problem, likely won’t be solved by some supreme effort of global bureaucratic will. But one could easily imagine it being solved by the normal, unwilled progress of technology. A battery—pick a number—five or 10 times more efficient than today’s, holding more energy and charging and discharging faster, would so revolutionize world energy practices that scientists would have to consider how a sudden decline in human carbon-dioxide emissions might affect the climate.

Solar and wind collection don’t have to be particularly efficient if storage becomes efficient. More solar energy reaches the earth’s surface in a year than is contained in all remaining reserves of fossil fuels and uranium. And to the inventor the financial and reputational rewards would be extravagant—which explains why billions of dollars are flowing into battery research.

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

United Scoundrels Of The World

If we take into account this margin of error, the most we can say is that 2014 was, so far as we know, just as warm as 2005 and 2010. There is no significant difference between these years. And that gives the lie to claims of runaway global warming. As the redoubtable Judith Curry recently pointed out:

“The real issue that is of concern to me is the growing divergence between the observed global temperature anomalies and what was predicted by climate models. Even if 2014 is somehow unambiguously the warmest year on record, this won’t do much to alleviate the growing discrepancy between climate model predictions and the observations.”

Friday, December 05, 2014

Union Of Concerned Busybodies

GMOs (genetically modified organisms) have been spectacularly successful in producing increased food crop yields, crops that are resistant to diseases and insects, and crops that need much less water than unmodified crops.

BUT corporations, those unredeemable products of evil capitalism, are making a profit from developing and marketing them. Therefore, liberal-progressive-socialists (who know what is best of you) MUST find reasons to ban them from use around the world, even through doing so will contribute to starvation of many of the world’s peoples.

Sunday, September 07, 2014

Darwinians Have A Mythical Bridge To Sell You

Believers in the religion of secular materialism will insist that any experiment should last at least a few million years to allow for the slow accretion of mutations that would lead to creation of a new species. Perhaps so, but in the mean time Darwinians can’t point to any evidence of the predicted evolutionary process, other than minor variations within a single species. Farmers and animal breeders have been familiar with such species manipulation for thousands of years.

No evidence of any kind in fossil records reveals any example of slow changes of one species into a wholly different species, let alone evolution from one genus to another. Such evidence must be present if there truly is such a thing as Darwinian evolution in the real world.